[kloop]

> Who would have thought someday a new engine rises in this climate, and then who would have thought it would be a small team, without a trillion dollar giant behind them pouring hundreds of millions into its production?

Anybody who has ever worked on a large enterprise software team. Anybody who has ever worked in this scenario will believe this. Computing history is full of 2-10 people teams beating giant well funded teams to the punch.

This mostly occurs because work expands to fill the time and resources allowed for the project (Parkinson's Law), and large companies have almost unlimited amounts of both.

[badsectoracula]

Exactly, and to add to that: people who work on the stuff they personally like tend to do thing faster than people who work on stuff because they have to (like it is often the case in large enterprises).

[sho_hn]

It also helps that working on a browser engine is "easy" in the sense that you are developing to a known target and there are increasingly decent test suites available. It helps a lot with keeping motivation alive since there's a persistent drip feed of low-hanging fruit and it'd easy to quantify your productivity and you don't get super stuck, vs. having to innovate or greenfield stuff. Teams of skilled volunteers excel at this, and makes for fairly easy contributor recruitment to feed that team. Making a browser engine is almost the ideal case.

The breadth of the task is staggering, but there is a real shot at posting the necessary endurance given the circumstances, being thrifty and given time.

Before you reach for the downvote button for talking out of my arse and calling what the Ladybird folks doing a (qualified, specific) "easy", when we at KDE created KHTML which later begat WebKit, for many years - kling might remember! - our IRC channel topic was "which mozilla bug do we emulate today?", so I've seen it happen once before! Ladybird can succeed; consider contributing.